Archive for Berry Kroeger

CRY OF THE CITY is essentially Robert Siodmak’ farewell to Hollywood filmmaking, and it’s a very strong one. It seems likely that his getting gypped out of the directing gig for ON THE WATERFRONT played a decisive role in driving him back to Europe. And while some of Siodmak’s later films are extremely good, in hindsight it looks like a mistake — he could have done better in America.

(Incidentally, I like the noir version of WATERFRONT Siodmak would have made, as I hazily imagine it, better than the Kazan method-and-location classic.)

Early in CRY is my fave scene — it has a show-stopping, lip-smacking turn by Berry Kroeger, who I wish was in the rest of the movie and in more movies and in bigger roles. And a ferocious perf from Richard Conte. The movie is unusual for its time in how ethnic it is — Conte plays a proper Italianamerican crook.

It’s a slow starter (I’m actually breaking into the scene midway as Kroeger enters). The two-shots of Conte and the nurse and Kroeger and the guard are fairly flat and deliberately pedestrian. Have patience. The first clever bit is Kroeger crossing the room to tie everything together and clarify the space, forming a new two-shot at the foot of Conte’s bed, while the nurse bustles in the bg.

As the scene progresses, Kroeger moves in and pulls the camera with him for a tighter medium two shot, Conte forming the lower horizontal edge and Kroeger the left vertical. Now Kroeger starts to seem more like a heavy as he reshapes the composition, walking behind Conte and leaning on the bedstead. It’s a jerk move, exploiting Conte’s immobility and making him strain round. It also helpfully makes the shot even tighter, more compact.

It gets fancier. Kroeger now completes his half-circle of the bed and takes a stance that turns him into a dark shape screen left, Conte looking up at him — the kind of angle that invites a cut to a reverse shot. But Siodmak holds off for a moment while Conte considers the situation, and when he does cut to a reverse, he makes it a surprise closeup. So far, Kroeger is the dominant party, mobile where Conte is pinned in place, towering over him, and now afforded a big gloating CU.

The reverse on Conte is just as big but of course it’s a high angle. Conte seems to be impressed by the offer, falling into line with Kroeger’s wishes.

Siodmak now returns to his master shot as Kroeger returns to his perch on the bedstead, hammily looking about for eavesdroppers before revealing the most criminous part of his scheme. Now Conte reveals he’s wise to Kroeger, and though his knowledge shakes up the slick lawyer’s plans, it doesn’t swerve him from his plans, and it doesn’t cause Siodmak to do anything particularly dramatic either. He’s not trying to give the impression that Conte has won.

Calmly, Kroeger now circles the back of the bed again and pulls the camera into a still more intimate two-shot, Conte larger in foreground but with his opponent standing just far back enough to be outside of his comfortable line of site. So Kroeger establishes continuing dominance. It’s a very popular kind of shot in classical Hollywood because it presents both actors’ faces clearly to the viewer.

“Get out!” snaps Conte, and Kroeger pulls the camera into a single at the foot of the bed, taking up his hat as if her were going to leave, but his whole attitude suggests he’s winning, not losing the argument. His power to make Siodmak’s camera follow him about is part of his charisma and strength. When he refers to Conte’s girl, we get a sort-of-matching shot of Conte, his static position maybe now starting to look like one of moral strength. Throughout, Siodmak resists obvious shot-reverse-shot matches, usually varying the size of one angle to make the exchange more expressive.

Now Kroeger LUNGES, and Siodmak lungers with him! The camera actually excitedly starts advancing on Kroeger before he’s off the starting block, and the effect is a vulpine swoop into a tight two-shot favouring Conte. Kroeger is a relatively bland profile view, but generally the reaction of the listener is more important than the face of the person giving information, and so giving the angle to his protagonist but the camera’s authority to Kroeger works very well indeed here. It’s the first moment when Siodmak’s verve reaches the fruity heights of Kroeger’s characterisation.

When Kroeger straightens up the camera, hypnotized by his smirking evil, has no choice but to mirror his movement and again we have a single on the triumphant antag.

The next cut should be awkward but I think we get away with it. An angle full on Conte, looking up the length of his body rather like the shots of Alex in bed at the end of CLOCKWORK ORANGE. The POV of Conte’s toes, perhaps. It’s tricky because it’s not a reverse of the previous shot by any means, and it’s not motivated by anything to speak of. Normally you’d expect a match cut on Kroeger exiting the previous frame but it’s possible Siodmak neglected to shoot that. What makes it feel like a match cut is Kroeger’s shadow, which is pretty much already in motion anticipating his entrance — so the angle change is justified because this is where Kroeger is headed. He’s still calling the shots.

This new frame makes the head of the bed an architectural element so that when Kroeger says “a face like a Madonna” with a weird accent on the last word as if it were exotically foreign, the image looks like an altarpiece. Kroeger positions himself directly above Conte, smirking down at him like an obscene cherub (Kroeger is always like an obscene cherub: he’s the evil version of Orson Welles).

Next, Siodmak jumps more or less straight in on BK, Frankenstein monster fashion, for a big, looming CU. Not a Leone brow-to-chin frame-filler, still pretty loose. It took extreme provocation to make a 40s filmmaker go Extreme. But this is more than enough to make Kroeger seem like a giant.

It’s followed by a Big Head of Richard, but upside-down, from Kroeger’s POV. Again, Conte gets a shot making him big, but he still appears weak because he’s inverted. The emphatic view of his forehead has us imagining beads of sweat (there aren’t any). But after a crosscut to Kroeger, something starts happening. Kroeger’s threats infuriate Conte rather than cowing him. His eyes dart about, then slowly rise to meet our gaze and —

The set up similar to the previous “altarpiece” frame — but when Conte abruptly grabs Kroeger by his big fat head, the camera rises as if pushed up by Conte’s corky arms. It’s elating and dramatic, and for the first time Conte has done something that has made Siodmak’s camera react — he’s taken control of the scene, and the movie, and the camera has to pay attention to him now.

One last grace note — as the two wrestle, a chair gets kicked and scoots left to right across the floor, motivating a fast pan which leads us to the nurse, hurrying to intervene. It’s only when she separates the men that we notice how low the angle is, a real noir-Wellesian neck-cricker, looking UP at the bed from ankle level. Siodmak has sidled up to his big dramatic effects, without robbing them of impact but integrating them into the scene to prevent sore-thumb syndrome.

With these words, CHAMBER OF HORRORS officially crosses the line into “movies I can’t believe I haven’t seen before.” Long before these immortal words are uttered, we’ve had the FEAR FLASHER and the HORROR HORN, cheapjack gimmicks to alert the squeamish, and we’ve had Patrick O’Neal chopping his own hand off with an axe, while underwater. This is a movie determined to deliver, come rain, snow, sleet or hail — a TV pilot script presumably rejected for gruesomeness, from the authors of MacGyver and THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, finds itself under the direction of Hy Averback, the not-quite-inspired helmer of films such as I LOVE YOU, ALICE B TOKLAS and huge amounts of TV — so why is it so GOOD?

There’s the script, which has weird concepts and funny lines to spare — what other 1966 movie opens with a madman forcing a priest, at gunpoint, to marry him to a corpse? And there’s even a hint that the marriage may have been consummated (!)… Cesare Danova is only so-so as leading man, but his sidekicks are Wilfred Hyde White and a charismatic Mexican dwarf billed as Tun Tun. And there are cameos by noir’s arch femme fatale Marie Windsor, primo sleazeball Berry Kroeger (in yellowface, no less) and some full-on cheroot-smoking zest from Jeanette Nolan, Orson’s Lady Macbeth. And, for no readily explainable reason, Tony Curtis turns up for thirty seconds, playing cards in a Baltimore brothel. “I have — excuse the expression — a full house.”

The fellow really holding it all together, even as he hacks the rest of the dramatis personae apart, is Patrick O’Neal, who on this evidence could have had Vincent Price’s career (the plot, in which the crazed scion of a wealthy family dismembers the officials who sent him to execution, sending parts to the police as if to assemble a Frankenstein’s homicide victim, seems to pre-echo Price’s PHIBES revenger’s comedies, even as it picks up from his earlier HOUSE OF WAX). O’Neal was a damn good actor, as you can see in KING RAT, but I’ve never seen him have this much fun, throatily whispering menaces, humming gleefully to himself, and attaching an amusing series of weapons to his wrist-stump, the best of these being a pistol concealed within a lifelike wax hand…

Pop!

The movie has perhaps not quite enough jokes, but makes up for it by having some jokes that are well above its station — and the ending will really make you wish that TV series had happened. Joe Dante should make it for Warners, immediately.

William Wellman’s THE IRON CURTAIN is a brazen propaganda flick about a Russian agent (Dana Andrews) who tries to defect in Canada. What with Wellman’s latter-day shift to the right, the film’s subject matter, and the ever-so-slight miscasting of Andrews and Gene Tierney as Russians, I wasn’t expecting great things.

The film has one of those stentorian voice-overs, like T-MEN, that always gives me a bit of a pain, and it’s rather comically scored with Russian classical music for that toney upscale espionage feeling. But the cinematography is FANTASTIC — Wellman treats it as noir all the way, with the Russians as gangsters (and I’m not so much a lefty that I can’t see the justice of that in this case) and the Canadian settings give it a wintry splendour. Charles G Clarke also shot MOONTIDE, and he has a real feeling for the shadows…

So, if the drama is wooden and one-note — and completely humourless — it’s still pretty watchable, just for the imagery. And we have the sneering villainy of Berry Kroeger, a sort of more-sybaritic Orson Welles figure, whom I’ve previously enjoyed in CRY OF THE CITY (venal mob lawyer), GUN CRAZY (sleazy carny), and many others. Berry K is one of the few actors who can simultaneously emit oil and poison from every pore, a skill which guaranteed he was never out of work at the studios, although he did have to bring his own mop.